Field of the Disclosure
Aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to an image forming apparatus using an electrophotographic method.
Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, in image forming apparatuses, there has been a demand to appropriately control a fixing temperature depending on an image to be formed. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2016-4231 discusses a method of controlling a fixing temperature according to the amount of toner calculated based on image data. Specifically, the method divides the entire region of image data into a plurality of areas each with a size of, for example, 32 dots by 32 dots, and controls the fixing temperature based on the amount of toner for an area to which the greatest amount of toner is allocated among all of the areas and the printing ratio of the entire image. In other words, if the greatest amount of toner is large, the method raises the fixing temperature to perform fixing, and, if the greatest amount of toner is small, the method lowers the fixing temperature to perform fixing.
Such a conventional method can be used to control the fixing temperature according to the printing ratio of an image to be formed. However, the conventional method performs control to analyze the entire region of image data and find an area to which the greatest amount of toner is allocated, and therefore, may need to have a configuration including, for example, a huge memory corresponding to image data and a central processing unit (CPU) which is high in processing speed for performing image analysis. As a result, the conventional method has an issue in the possibility of leading to an increase in cost.